Guest Moral of the Story: When Bad Ideas Seem Like Good Ideas

This is a guest post from Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain. It takes a brave man to tackle a Moral of the Story post. I told him I’d post this last Tuesday. You’ll notice I am a little late. This is because I am a deeply flawed human being. Thanks for your patience, Mark.

“You canna change the laws of physics, Captain!” I don’t know if Mr. Scott actually said that classic phrase in a Star Trek movie or episode, but I learned that lesson very well during one of my summer jobs. It was a messy, embarrassing, humbling experience. Since this is IttyBiz, and Naomi slipped away for a few minutes, I’m going to share this story with you. Because that’s what IttyBiz is about — embarrassingly personal stories that (should) teach someone a lesson!

Foreshadowing: later on in this article I’m going to describe something that will resemble a volcanic eruption – except that the “volcano” is lying on its site. Wait for it.

Make a hard job easier

We’re often asked to do hard things in life, inside or outside of our business. Maybe we have to chop 10 cords of firewood with a small hand axe. Perhaps the garage needs cleaning. A client needs a new website with 4,000 words of copy – STAT! With images and diagrams!

Income taxes.

Work can be physically difficult, mentally challenging, or downright tedious. We’ve all seen that. Yet work must be done!

So we invent short cuts. Tricks. Tips. Cheats, even. We’re desperate to save time and effort. So we look for guidance from knowledgeable sources. We read blogs, books, and magazines. We ask our friends, our colleagues, even our enemies (then verify that info with people that we can trust) for help.

And sometimes… we experiment.

Don’t get me wrong. Experimentation has led to many wonderful success stories.

But sometimes… something that might seem like a good idea is really a bad idea. We’re willing to overlook the risk of disaster if someone’s got us by the short and curlies and we’re desperate, but sometimes we make decisions that we’d never make if we stopped to think about the consequences.

Lazy college kid dislikes manual labor

I washed trailers (the 42 + feet long trailers that transport tons of cargo along our highways) one summer. My cleaning machine looked like a giant paint-brush roller on a wheeled cart. The brush stood on one end and was about ten feet high. A motor would make the giant brush rotate, kind of like a roller brush does when you’re painting a wall. However, instead of coating a trailer with paint, I was scrubbing it – providing the same results of taking your car through a carwash.

Unless it’s lubricated or using some kind of cleaner, a dry brush won’t clean very well. So, in addition to spraying lots and lots of water on the trailer’s outside, I had to use a chemical solution to loosen up the soot that builds up on the top rails of a trailer. One part cleaning solution, six parts water – this was the magic formula to make the solution.

Once mixed, the cleaning solution was stored in an old cast-iron boiler (picture a fat metal barrel or tank) on wheels, which was pressurized to 200 PSI or some ridiculous number. This pressure would force the cleaning solution through a hose so I could spray the trailer before cleaning – a little lever allowed me to start or stop the spray.

The air pressure and the cleaning solution tended to run out at the same time, so that was the signal to pull the boiler back into the shop and mix a new batch. And so on.

Laziness and little thought = disaster

Well, that frickin’ boiler was heavy, especially having been refilled with cleaning solution. It had wheels (tires, even), but it was still heavy and the tires were getting a bit worn and soft. In short, it was a pain in the ass to move the full boiler.

So I experimented with ways to move the boiler with less effort.

Did I mention that I took one year of science of university? Including physics? This becomes important soon.

I noticed that if I were to lift the boiler by its handle, making it pivot on its axle, the boiler seemed less heavy when I pulled at along. Must have been the way the weight shifted in the boiler. So I was feeling proud of myself thinking, “Hey, I don’t have to work so hard!” Even more miraculously, the more I lifted up on the handle, the easier it seemed to be. It was great!

So, after filling up and pressuring this boiler on one sunny summer’s afternoon, I proceeded to lift up on the handle and haul the boiler out. I tried my clever technique to lighten the load and I tipped it up. I tipped it up fairly high. In fact, I tipped it up higher than I ever had before. Here’s where the experiment went wrong. I should have paid more attention in physics class.

At the time I probably weighed at least 180 lbs., so I wasn’t exactly a small guy. But that was peanuts compared to the power of gravity and the laws of physics.

WHAM!

The whole frickin’ boiler tipped up on its front, pulling me up in the air so that I was practically standing on the boiler!

SNAP!

The valve that I used to pump air into the boiler broke off faster than a Julia Roberts engagement!

WHOOSH!

Gallons of the cleaning solution shot out of the boiler and across the floor of the building where I worked, much like a volcano on its side, erupting.

SHOUTS AND CURSES!

My co-workers wondered what the hell happened and started cursing me (including one or two guys who got sprayed… oops!)

I, of course, got to clean up the mess. Once the boiler was fixed (I didn’t get to use it again that day), I barely lifted the handle higher than one inch, no matter how heavy the boiler was.

What’s the moral of the story?

Some more serious thought (and an ounce of common sense) would have led me to figure out that raising the handle too high would cause the boiler to tip over, just as it did. The full boiler weighed more than I did, plus it had gravity and momentum on its side, so there was no damn way to stop it once it passed a “tipping point”.

We’re all looking for better, faster, easier ways to do crappy, boring, hard tasks. Experimentation is important, and it leads to innovation. These are very good things!

Use some common sense when you experiment and think before you act. That way YOU won’t have to clean up the mess when you do something really, really dumb (and there’s no one nearby to absorb the blame.)

And if you don’t buy that argument, some other time I’ll tell you the story about how I broke the glass window in the photocopier: another example of how bad ideas can seem like good ideas.

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By Naomi Dunford - 8 Comments